Correct, the tape is about prints, individual prints. Hence the ticker tape machine that printed out each individual print.
I talked about perfect prints in detail on this thread. Use the search button on the upper right hand corner and type in my name and perfect prints and you will find the post. I don't want to type all that out again.
Thanks for your take on it Maverick. The prints are just price and volume on an intraday basis. Daily bars with their volume are the same thing. They are however, a consolidation of the individual prints. Therefore, as one can read the individual prints to see supply/demand imbalances one can also tape read the consolidated prints and search for demand/supply imbalances. The micro doesn't exclude the macro. You just have to know the rules of interpretation to read the bars. I call it tape reading reading daily..weekly..monthly..whatever. I also say you can read intraday charts to pick out supply/demand imbalances and I call that tape reading intraday along with the intraday type of reading you speak of. I am not talking about chart patterns such as triangles, ....etc
Maverick do you ever miss the game? The glory of hitting it right on most of your daytrading stocks? May I ask your age? Did you leave it for that reason? Just wondering? I couldn't do it. Not 15 - 30 stock a day! Now my 24 year old son might could.
No, I really don't miss it that much. I was never happy. No matter how much money I made, I always got pissed at how the specialist would sneak something by me that I didn't catch. I'm 31 now. I just left because I was burned out and I couldn't see myself doing this forever. I thought about the big picture and where I wanted to be 5, 10, 20 years from now and I figured I wanted to start building towards that. You always want to look at the big picture. Ask yourself this question, "is what I'm doing today really moving me closer to where I want to go?" If it's not, what are you doing?
Not only did you learn to read the tape but you learn to think like a wise man. Kuddos on that. Today I spotted a buyer for the first time. I saw him on the TAS at TXN near noon, the market was printing bids getting hit at 33.52, when 33.52 was dry of bids the market never went down to .51 it only printed about 5 prints, something like 20,000 shares total. just to go back to .52 It was the last time that the stock touched that price. I used a TAS window filtering all orders except to those executed by the specialist... I figure if Im trying to get on top of the specialist's moves, everything else is just noise...
So basically what the perfect print tells you is that the seller got muscle out by the buyer at 55.62?
Yes, it tells you the seller is out of stock. Notice how more size prints then what is showing on the offer. A seller could sit there showing a 1000 on the offer when he really has 45k shares to sell. So you'll see print after print after print then finally you will see an odd number. This is all he has left. Once that has lifted, the stock is going to run. It's very important to spot these because if you miss it for a second and then look back you might see the stock higher but you'll also see some more large offers come in and you'll think there is a big seller in the stock when in fact there is a huge buyer.